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Every so often, I’ll acquire one of those catalogues you get free in TV Quick, TV Week, TV Shite, or similar. My mother in law saves them for me because she knows I’ve got problems.

The latest catalogue I got has made me reconsider collecting them. Trust me, this one’s a doozy.

Looks pretty unassuming doesn’t it, with its… whatever the fuck that is on the front cover. I’ll admit, most of it is the generic wonder crap you see in all these catalogues – back enhancers, piss remover, things with pictures of owls on them… But halfway through, with no warning whatsoever, I stumbled on a section that has made me need therapy.

As we embark on this journey together, please remember that this catalogue’s intended market is 89 year old ladies called Mavis, whose primary hobby is telling people they’re 89.

Let’s begin with some normal tat.

US Army super torch

What is it with these catalogues and their obsession with torches? No one needs a torch with the power of 1000 suns. Especially no one needs two of them.

Beanie headlight

Disclaimer: I’ve bought this for one of my relatives for Christmas.

Disclaimer 2: I suspect she’ll do the expression that woman’s doing when she opens it.

Disclaimer 3: I only got it for her because I want to see her charging up her head at a plug socket.

Sonic Screwdriver

Introducing the new… ‘What?’. That’s what your relatives will say when you show them this! Unless your relatives are Doctor Who nerds, in which case see above. I don’t even watch Doctor Who, but I’m pretty sure a stick that fixes anything with magic light is a Sonic Screwdriver. Or a magic wand. Or a con.

Colour co-ordinating rugs

These co-ordinate with any colour scheme, as long as it’s one of the colours in the rug. And even then it doesn’t always go.

This is like when my mother used to make me wear a pink t-shirt with sodding paisley leggings, and to justify it she’d go “well it’s got bits of pink in it! Look! Fine I’ll get you a magnifying glass.”

Admittedly, they’re great if you’re always cleaning up blood, sick and poo.

Husband kicker

Is your husband annoying you again? Maybe he’s doing that funny loud breathing, or maybe he saw there was a plate in the sink and tutted. Never fear – vengeance is here! With our patented ‘bollock kicking boots’, you can boot him back to the shed, where he belongs. And also he’ll be bleeding out of his balls. Men, amirite?

I know we’ve said they’re for poking holes in your grass, but come on, we had to say that.

Heater

If this is such a good heater, why is she still wearing a hat and scarf?

String vest for your settee

“Revamp your sofa!” By dressing it up like that one off Keeping Up Appearances. Maybe your sofa will become self aware and start reading the Racing Post, who knows? Maybe it will start sighing in a comedy way if you ask it to take its feet off itself?

But where’s the ‘MY EYES’ section of this catalogue? I’m getting to that. I’m giving you time to smoke some crack before you see it.

Dr Nick Riviera’s weight loss foot pads

Hi everybody! Did you know you could lose up to sixteen stone in A DAY, just by rubbing your foot a bit? If you didn’t know this, that’s because it’s not true.

Inappropriate products for the Easylife catalogue #1: WEED

Look, I’m all for getting stoned off your tits, but you don’t want your 89 year old Grandma to be putting weed on her All Bran. Especially once you discover that the reason she’s doing weed is to “loosen up” for your Grandad…

Inappropriate products for the Easylife catalogue #2 : MY EYES

I know my scanner has blurred out some of the text, but trust me that’s for your own good. My scanner knows what it’s doing, even if I don’t.

The reason your mother/grandmother/great-grandmother is using that pelvic floor exerciser? It’s so she can successfully do a reverse cowgirl. Let that sink in. And also so she can use that knock-off Rampant Rabbit. Not that I’d know about those things.

What’s that you say? “I wish it would get 100 times worse”? OK.

Porn and cock pumps for the elderly. More specifically, Porn and cock pumps for people who shop from the Easylife catalogue.

That first DVD claims to be about “oral sex techniques”, but the picture does not show anything of the sort. A lot of 89 year old Mavises are going to be very confused.

Or maybe it actually says “Great sex techniques”, and I’m the Mavis? Who knows.

Also, do you want to take bets on how much saxophone music accompanies this? My guess is “108 minutes”. Assuming I’ll ever buy this and watch it, which I will not.

“Over 18s only.” No shit.

I’m not going to say anything about the penis pump. I’m just going to pretend I never saw it. I’d advise you to do the same.

Loads of batteries

These are just to calm you guys down after that drugs ‘n’ tits extravaganza.

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This is from several different catalogues, right? My Mum glances at these things too, for the purposes of taking the piss, obviously. She got the catalogue with the rabbit in and asked incredulously “Is that what I think it is?” I don’t think that edition had the DVDs or the pump in it though. I think I would have noticed those as I flicked through, taking the piss and, upon reaching the page in question, confirming that, yes, that it exactly what she thinks it is.

What annoys me is how many of these products are not merely pointless shit made out of plastic which will end up inside of seabirds when they get thrown out for the garbage which they so obviously are. They are also unsafe, energy inefficient, grounded in pseudo-science and just plain do not work. Those electric space heater plugs are… No! Just no! Those space heaters are far more likely to kill grandma than that rabbit ever is, but then if she is buying those overpriced Duracells for the rabbit then that’s no good for anybody except Duracell. At least invest in a battery charger and some rechargeable AAs, FFS! I’m pretty sure that they used to advertise battery chargers in these catalogues too. Maybe they decided that flogging single use Duracells was more profitable.

As for all the cannabis products… Surely that isn’t going to fool anybody? The baby boom generation knows its THC from its CBD, probably more so than all the dozy teenagers in the high street vape shops, right? Similarly, I hope that the boomers remember the wise words of Bob Dylan when he told them “The pump don’t work ‘cos the vandals took the handles” because if those stupid pumps really did what they claim then you wouldn’t need to send away to EasyShite to get them. They would be best sellers in every supermarket, chemist and petrol station in the land. Oddly enough, they aren’t.

I’m over 40 and still having sex the same way I did in my 20s, apart from having to be more careful of the wife’s iffy spine. I didn’t realise we needed retraining…

Those beanie hats with the COB light are very popular with plumbers, incidentally. I work at a plumbers’ merchants and we got a load to give away with something or other (may have been screwdriver sets, or cistern syphons, or whatever), and they were gone inside two days. A couple of our warehouse lads still wear them, they’re useful for finding things in dark corners.